Insight: Omni-Channel Integration – A New Entry into the Marketing Lexicon

It’s beginning to appear in more and more articles (and in the briefs we get; 2 so far this year) – “omni-channel” is definitely becoming the new marketing buzzword. Someone said the other day that they’d heard that it was reinvented or re-engineered as a more general marketing term by McKinsey’s. We prefer to think of it as a post “The Thick of It” redefinition of omnishambles marketing for the digital age. Malcolm Tucker (Marketing Director) to Nicola Murray (Channel Manager) “Our * customer journey planning for the digital-* age is an * omnishambles – we need to be more like * Burberry(+) in having a true *omni-channel strategy”. (*expletive deleted).

We’ve been a through buzzword history of phases like brand integrated comms, channel-neutrality, multi-touchpoint and multichannel marketing, consumer ecosystems, and now it’s the turn of omni-channel. Whilst it is currently in Wikipedia it is only there in the context of Omni-Channel Retailing. We expect it to reappear as a wider marketing channel plot any day now.

Is it a good thing?

Yes, we think so. Anything which again attempts to move away from silo’d functional marketing teams and agency disciplines the better it is for bigger ideas, more integrated thinking and for consumer-centric marketing overall. (Nicola Murray currently - “This is our new Digital Marketing Team – they are all young, wear shorts and sit in the basement next to The IT Crowd – so much fun!…”)

+ Note: Most briefs now include Burberry as the mandatory example of “who we’d most admire/want to be like”.